Twilight fans may need to step back and reassess their love of vampires and werewolves, as a recent rise in occult activity throughout the world is alarming some Christian scholars.

More than just a flippant fascination, youth today have become fixated on popular entertainment subjects like vampires, ghosts and witches, taking their interests to the extreme, and acting out in accordance.

Just a few months ago, a 19-year-old in Texas, claiming to have been a 500-year-old vampire needing to be fed, broke into a woman’s home, threw her against the wall, and tried to suck her blood.

Another instance in Florida involved a teenage girl who was charged along with four others for beating a 16-year-old to death. They were part of a purported vampire cult, with one teenage girl calling herself a vampire/werewolf hybrid.

“Psychologists have long understood how women in general desire strength in men, but few could have imagined how this natural and overriding need by young ladies would be used in modern times to seduce them of their innocence using mysteriously strong yet everlastingly damned creatures depicted in popular books and films like Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse,” publisher Thomas Horn said in a statement.

“Consider as an example popular youth-oriented magazines like Rolling Stone and their article ‘The Joy of Vampire Sex.’ Look at the ménage-à-trois on the magazine’s cover of three nudes bathed in blood with the promise to readers that vampires are ‘Hot. They’re Sexy. They’re Undead.’”

“Listing all of the related fan sites, music videos, magazines, television shows and movies currently dedicated to sexual [or romantic] obsession with alluring demons-in-flesh would be daunting. But these would have to include television shows like ‘Being Human,’ ‘The Gates,’ ‘Underworld,’ ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and ‘True Blood,’ not to mention the hedonistic gay-themed program ‘The Lair,’ a series that plays nationwide on all major cable systems based on a vampire-run sex club.”

Admonishing parents, pastors and youth pastors to pay closer attention to what their children were “mentally and spiritually feeding on,” Horn hopes that Christians would begin to act to counter the dangers of pop culture’s fascination on occult practices before a generation was “lost to darkness.”

“Frankly, preachers need to care enough about those families and youth within their care to take a stand, or stand down; be gusty enough to use their pulpit for something eternally useful, or quit the ministry and become a car salesman.”

Though the worry might be overlooked by many who felt Horn’s admonition was an over-assessment on pop culture, believing that the current trends would eventually fade and no longer be relevant, Horn said they could not be farther from the truth.

“As a doctor of theology with a past in exorcism, I couldn’t disagree more,” he told The Raiders News Network.

“Mass media including the Internet, television, film, radio and other communications systems have traded Bela-Lugosi-like vampires of former years and silly Abbott and Costello’s Frankenstein and Mummies, which could be vanquished with Christian symbols, for monsters of profound demonic character depicted as impervious to Christ’s power,” Horn said.

“As a result, today’s youth have exchanged yesterday’s pigtails and pop-guns for pentagrams and blood covenants aligned with forces far stronger than former generations could have imagined.”

With everything happening in culture today, Horn urged Christian leaders to use the month of October and the season of Halloween to address these issues, which he said are infecting everyone around the world, including those in the United States.

In the United States alone, there were more than 200,000 registered witches and as many as 8 million unregistered practitioners of “the craft,” according to multiple conservative scholars who documented a report on the rise of occult activity in a collaborative work entitled God’s Ghostbusters.

Well-known Christian leaders like Chuck Missler, Gary Stearman, Noah Hutchings, Gary Bates and John McTernan, who contributed to the work, also believe in the gravity of the situation, and have called on other leaders to make a change.

To help pastors, Christian education directors, Sunday school teachers and ministry leaders address such topics this Halloween, a 270-page teachers guide, as well as two books on the subject in pdf format, have been made available to download at no cost on the God’s Ghostbusters page.